Review:

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

If the sheer amount of dogmatic death threats within the book Alcoholics
Anonymous wasn't bad enough along comes the sequel. Written during his 11-year
crippling bout of depression, William Griffith Wilson with some help from
Tom P. wrote a guide which, in Wilson's words, "...to become happily and
usefully whole." Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12x12) is an
expanded guide on how one should "work" the Steps and Traditions.

The standout piece within this twisted text is The
Story of Ed as related within the discussion of the Third Tradition (pp.
143-145). It is a tale of how Wilson and his wonderful Gang Of Drunks kicked
Ed out to die an alcoholic death just because he wouldn't submit to Wilson's
idea of what God was. It is the sick fantasy made real which Wilson offered
as mere conjecture within the Fourth chapter of the book
Alcoholics Anonymous ("We Agnostics")
and shows as to what length Wilson's cult would go just to get someone to
hit bottom just because of such blasphemy.

In retrospect, I don't believe Ed was an atheist. To correlate this story
with "We Agnostics" proves that Wilson deemed anyone as an either
an atheist or an agnostic if they disagreed with any of Wilson's ideas of
God. In the hundreds of meetings that I have participated in there is a distinct
idea of God that A.A. defines within its image. From the 12x12: "Unless
each A.A. member follows to the best of his ability our suggested Twelve
Steps to recovery, he almost certainly signs his own death warrant."
(pp. 174)

Even worse, in spite of the Traditions, all of Wilson's dreams have come
true as listed within the discussion of Tradition Six (reformatted in list
form with additional commentary for emphasis from pp. 155-156):

Here are some of the things we dreamed:

Hospitals didn't like alcoholics, so we thought we'd build a hospital chain
of our own. (Hazelden, as the "Minnesota model", opened utilizing Dr.
Robert Holbrook Smith's indoctrination techniques from Akron,
Ohio.)

People needed to be told what alcoholism was, so we'd educate the public,
even rewrite school and medical textbooks. (Marty Mann, the second
female member of A.A., along with Wilson and Smith, founded the National
Council of Alcoholism - NCA [now known as the National Council on Alcoholism
and Drug Dependence - NCADD] to promote such ideology. Dr. Ruth Fox founded
the American Society on Addiction Medicine, ASAM, to pitch the disease mythology
towards medical physicians.)

We'd gather up derelicts from skid rows, sort out those who could get well,
and make it possible for the rest to earn their livelihood in a kind of
quarantined confinement. (In essence choosing from such a lot to recruit
future counselors for the aforementioned facilities, nevermind the obvious
conflicts of interest if they were to claim they
were "social workers" working independently of A.A.)

Maybe these places would make large sums of money to carry on our other good
works. (Stays at Hazelden and Betty Ford, for example, costs tens of
thousands of dollars.)

We seriously thought of rewriting the laws of the land, and having it declared
that alcoholics are sick people. No more would they be jailed; judges would
parole them in our custody. (Mandatory mental imprisonment and
indoctrination within A.A. meetings or jailtime within an actual physical
prison!)

We'd spill A.A. into the dark regions of dope addiction and criminality.
(Most A.A. and 12-Step meetings in general take place at
night.)

We'd form groups of depressive and paranoid folks; the deeper the neurosis,
the better we'd like it. It stood to reason that if alcoholism could be licked,
so could any problem. (Hence the expansion of Buchmanism as the "treatment"
for all types of behaviors from gambling to performing an inordinate amount
of research upon the internet...and labeling it as a compulsion only a "spiritual
experience" can cure within various "Anonymous" sects. And my, are those
folks depressed...just like Wilson himself!)

Nevermind the fact that A.A. will never hold itself accountable to the Traditions
which are nothing more than an unenforcable facade. The Traditions look wonderful
to an outsider but they will NEVER be enforced by the leadership of A.A.
for one reason from the 12x12 itself (pp. 192):

They derive no real authority from their titles; they do not
govern.

No one within the membership is held accountable. No one ever will, that
is, unless A.A. members "carry the message" with their own translated versions
of the book Alcoholics Anonymous and distribute them outside the auspices
of A.A. World Services. Nevermind the abuses as documented not only within
with 12x12 via the story of Ed but through Rebecca Fransway's
"A.A.
Horror Stories", those books should never be distributed lest
the message becomes diluted within Mexico and Germany! That kind of activity
will net'cha a lawsuit!

Hypocritical, twisted and sick. If there's anything which is so dark and
perverse it would be this book. It is not just documentation of tragedy and
despair projected from one man's sick mind upon alcoholics, it is
a darkly unfunny farce of what A.A. has aspired and devolved into today.
It's everything Wilson ever dreamed of. For shame!

Note: Both files above are distributed in .ZIP archive format.
Download a .ZIP utility to decompress them. Both .ZIP files are unmodified
and presented as-is from their original pro-A.A. download sources. Consider
this my own idea of 12-Step work put into action.

Last updated 2005/09/04 - Added link to ARID Media .PDF version
Updated 2005/06/24 - Added link to "The Story of Ed"First posted 2005/04/18

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